eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

December 2015

12/23/2015

“We are all born before we are born.” That is, much of who we will be is laid down in the histories and stories of our parents’ lives. In God, Faith, and Identity from the Ashes, the reader is given the opportunity of hearing just how the experiences of holocaust survivors have challenged and shaped the lives of their children and grandchildren. Edited by Menachem Rosensaft, the book provides us with an anthology of about ninety different Jewish children or grandchildren of survivors. The collective themes and contrasts offer us a stained glass window of resiliency and introspection. For most, the experiences of their parents are the defining experiences of their own lives. And all must navigate the question of how they wish to pass their vicarious experience of trauma to a subsequent generation. “We who are haunted by the past must now pass on our legacy of ghosts” one suggests in trying to explain the purpose of their endeavor.

Organized under four major themes, the short essays answer questions about how the holocaust experience continues to impact the faith of those who descended from survivors. We also learn about how their family heritage shapes their identity as Jews and as humans. A third section is centered on better understanding how different decedents have wrestled with the challenge of passing on memory without passing on trauma. Lastly, we are exposed to the place that family tragedy has played in the way that second and third generation survivors seek to live lives of constructive, even redemptive, purpose in the world Whether the editor would have benefitted from selecting a few essays written by candidates who had not faired well is an interesting question. The authors who write for this publication all seem to be high acheivers, They are rabbis, doctors, researchers, academics, office holders, writers, Knesset members, philosophers, artists, judges, Chief Financial Officers of banks, magazine publishers, psychotherapists, sociologists, musicians, college deans, lawyers, journalists, investment managers, historians, librarians, playrights, museum directors, filmmakers, senators, CEOs, and leaders in numerous non-profits and NGOs. No one in this book is an addict, a criminal, a bum, or illiterate.

One suspects that these people feel a burden to accomplish what millions of their generational peers might have if their parents had survived. Some seek to resurrect the religion that their parents believed in or had surrendered in order to assimilate. Others express a deep ambivalence about a faith that could have allowed such suffering. “Both the God of consolation and the accusation against God lives within me” one writes, while others retain their faith in spite of their parents’ experience. “We are witnesses to God and humanity,” Rabbi Michael Murmar reminds the reader, “and that call to witness is not predicated on assurances of reward in this world or the next.”

“Ultimately, after wrestling with these supreme questions I can't give a cogent explanation as to why I pray to God whose existence I would not try to argue for or who's management I often question. Except to say that it was absorbed from my parents by osmosis.” - Joseph Berger

As Jacob Gladstein, the Yiddish poet put it, "we accepted the Torah on Sinai and in Lublin [a ghetto in Poland] we give it back."

Some retain their commitment to the traditions of a faith that they may no longer hold to intellectually because they would see it as a betrayal of their parents’ suffering to surrender that faith in a time of ease.

"The man I admire and respect most in this world was willing to die for the particulars," Judge Karen Friedman writes,

“His steadfast belief in God translated into a strict observance of the details – before the war, during the war, and after the war. No change. No divergence. No distractions. That knowledge has always made a deep impression on me. For him, the tradition is a living, breathing entity to be passed from him to his children, to his grandchildren, and so on. Knowing that it has been successfully passed down was the ultimate victory over the Nazis for him and his generation. How do I rob him of that? How can I turn my back on that kind of dedication? I cannot and have not. My observance and my transmittal of the heritage – including the particulars – is my gift to him and to his generation. My grandparents have taught me that it is not the devil that is in the details, but God himself."

Rabbi Lilly Kaufman asks if those who survived are permitted to let memories of their parents’ suffering fade. "Are we allowed to turn away from the collective memory of the screams? Are we allowed to be healthy after the Shoah?" she asks? Constantly, there is a recurring question that arises as to how to retain memory without revictimizing the innocent. “In order for there to be a healthy Jewish community,” Rabbi Mordechai Liebling asks, “we must begin to explore what healthy Holocaust remembrance could and should be. We don't really know, and it is high time for us to find out.”

Other Jews go on record as knowing what their responsibility is in this regard. “The overriding principle by which I raised our children,” Sylvia Pozner asserts, “can be simply stated: I want them to feel the tragedy in their hearts first and learn the facts later.” For at least one other holocaust descendant, Elaine Culbertson, there is something immediate that must be acknowledged as uninherited suffering. Many second generation survivors note the eerie absence of so many uncles, aunts, and cousins in their families. “As I grow older,” Culbertson confesses, “my emotions are more intensely triggered by something I call the presence of absence. It is a feeling I have known since childhood.”

Historian, Yehuda Bauer insists that one can learn lessons from a parents’ past without having to transfer their PTSD symptoms. "We should add three new commitments to the original ten” he said in his January 27, 1998, address to the German Bundestag, “not to be a perpetrator, not to be a bystander, and not to be a victim – again."

This is a book that reminds us once again of the dance that we all have to navigate our way through as we move from lives as children to lives as parents. What ideas, practices, assumptions, commitments, ethics, purposes do we want to intercept or introduce as we pass that baton from the way we are raised to the way we raise.

I wonder if anyone does that well. It is hard to imagine what the process might look like as a son or daughter of holocaust survivors.

Until now.

Question for Comment: What parental inheritances have you intentionally excluded from your parenting? What inheritances have you intentionally transmitted? Why?

12/13/2015

For some reason, I have been attracting movies and articles about marital affairs into my life lately. Felix and Meira is a Canadian movie about the wife of an orthodox Canadian Jew who begins to feel herself mis-cast in her role as wife and mother in an orthodox community where her life is scripted and handed to her – where the life she lives feels like a lobster’s shell she has outgrown but not left.

“I’d like to know what it feels like to be other people.” She says. “I don’t know where I am any more.”

In Hannah Rosin’s interview with author/marriage counselor/public speaker, Esther Perel, in Slate Magazine (March 27, 2014), Perel, who works exclusively with couples that are dealing with marital affairs says that even married people in relatively happy marriages have affairs, often because they assume that they are somehow missing out on life if they are not supremely happy, not just moderately happy. “What’s changed,” she says of contemporary marriages,

“is, we expect a lot more from our relationships. We expect to be happy. We brought happiness down from the afterlife, first to be an option and then a mandate. So we don’t divorce—or have affairs—because we are unhappy but because we could be happier.”

Perel also notes that affairs are often the result of marriages that do not account for transformative change within the individual life cycle. “I can tell you right away the most important sentence in the book,” Perel says of the new book she is writing,

“because I’ve lectured all over the world and this is the thing I say that turns heads most often: Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”

“Most people today, for the sheer length we live together, have two or three marriages in their adult life, and some of us do it with the same person. For me, this is my fourth marriage with my husband and we have completely reorganized the structure of the relationship, the flavor, the complementarity.”

Her argument seems to be that as individuals change over the course of their lives, their relationships with significant others need to be restructured, amended, and renegotiated. As people add dimensions to their personalities or leave aspects of belief systems behind, they are no longer exactly suited to their partners as they once were. They begin to feel a disconnect and go seeking to find a partner for the new version while trying to maintain the partner that is so well suited to the old or present version. “They remain monogamous in their beliefs, but they experience a chasm between their behavior and their beliefs,” she says,

“And what I am going to really investigate in depth is why people are sometimes willing to lose everything, for a glimmer of what?”

She believes that “that affairs are often a powerful alarm system for a structure that needs change.” This brings us back to Felix and Meira. In the first introductions that we have to Meira’s relationship with her husband, Shulem, we see her playing modern music on a phonograph as she tucks her small child down for a nap. Shulem enters unexpectedly and sharply rebukes her. His is a world where music remains strictly religious in nature. He is aligned and attuned to some sort of Polish chanting we see in a nearby scene. He expects her to remain similarly aligned. He expects her to remain the person she was raised to be. Her response is somewhat of a symbol really. She falls on the floor and feigns death. Why? Because her new self is her real self now and he wants that self dead, essentially. He is not willing to make the transition out of his orthodox community for her.

It is no wonder that she finds herself attracted to this stranger she meets on the street one day. A stranger who is himself undefined and lacking in conviction about anything. He represents someone who has no certainties and thus who could be expected to let her explore being a different person without judgement.

Perel stresses that there are no perfect marriages – no one person solutions to all our needs for all time, an “extraordinary idea!” as Perel puts it. For Meira, her problem is not exactly that her husband is no longer a good fit. It is that he expresses his unwillingness to change the terms of the relationship to some new fit. “When are you going to realize that this is your life?” he asks her. All of the change that can happen is her willingness to surrender what is going on in her organic soul therefore. To put it in the words of Jesus (though I am sure that I am taking him out of context here),

“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins.”

You cannot take something that will not change and attach it permanently to something that will not stay unchanged.

In her TED talk about infidelity and in several other interviews that she has given, Esther Perel is asked if she thinks affairs are good ideas. She argues that they may lead to something good but that they are never good.

Slate: Would you ever recommend an affair?

Perel: No more than I would recommend cancer and yet a lot of people finally understand the value of life when they get sick.

I think, if I could summarize her perspective, she would argue that affairs are a far more traumatic way to get a result that good communication might have pre-empted far less injuriously. In seeking to avoid a conflict of renegotiated relationships, couples can blast their way out of the log-jam by cheating on one another and making life in an old paradigm impossible, not simply undesirable.

Last year, the Television serial The Affair won the Golden Globe award for Best Television Series. The second season premiered last week. It would appear that people are interested in the subject. I suppose it is good to bring the issue into the open air for discussion. But in the end, it would probably be best for all to be looking for reasons why affairs happen and could be prevented before they do than for people to be looking for justifications for their happening after they do.

In the last scene of Felix and Meira, we see the couple in a romantic gondola ride through the canals of Venice. Meira realizes that she now has a new partner. But really nothing else. She has left a community for a man. Felix finds himself trying to comfort her crying child. He has left his isolation for a woman, but he is now firmly in the bounds of a community. It’s that awful moment when, as New York Times movie reviewer, Jeanette Catsoulis says, “We did it!” tips over into “What have we done?”

Cut to credits.

Question for Comment: Have you had relationships that could not navigate changes within one partner? What has been the key ingredient in the relationships that have survived time in your life?

12/05/2015

Harold Bloom is one of America’s most highly respected intellectuals in general and literary critics in particular. Who would I be to say anything critical? And yet, …

I checked out his lecture series on the tragedies of Shakespeare the other day and found myself fairly quickly immersed in them as he began to expound on Romeo and Juliet. “Juliet” he argued was a character that one might almost refer to as an invention. What Darwin’s theory was to Darwin, Juliet was to Shakespeare, an original act of inventive genius. It is as though Shakespeare had created an Adam as originally as God created Adam. Juliet, he says defines what it means to be a young woman in love in a way that no human writer has done before or since.

Okay. I guess that is sort of interesting. Thinking of literary characters as inventions and thinking of those inventions as effecting paradigm shifts in human cultures. I like entertaining grand ideas. Subsequently, Bloom launches into a three lecture series on Hamlet and again, we discover that Shakespeare has done it again. He has invented the world’s most intelligent man (albeit a literary character). “Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who thinks too much,” one critic has said. “No,” Bloom counters, citing Nietzsche, “Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who thinks too well.” Bloom called Hamlet “an ambassador of death” suggesting that the character Hamlet is negotiation on all our behalves, with the inevitability of death.

So far, so good. But then we launch into a multi-lecture series on King Lear, and then Macbeth, and the listener, at least this listener, begins to get a little lost. OR perhaps just worn out by the incessant encomiums to Shakespeare’s genius. Bloom seems to give up explaining or enlightening us, content to overwhelm us with his almost slavish devotion to his subject. It started to feel like a Shakespeare worship service where the choruses swell in praise without explaining exactly why.

Progressively, his use of the word “extraordinary” began to drive me incrementally mad. By the time Lear was driven out into the storm, insane, I too was going all Tom Bedlam. He begins to load every other sentence with the adjective “extraordinary” until the sheer inflationary excess renders the word meaningless. Every character starts becoming “extraordinary.” Scenes are “extraordinary.” Literary references are “extraordinary.” The emotions of characters are “extraordinary.” Choices of words are “extraordinary.” Plot developments, dialogs, sufferings, humor, stage directions, all “extraordinary.” Everything down to Shakespeare’s underwear one imagines must have been “extraordinary.” Sentences that do not contain the word, “extraordinary” are full of synonyms. One minor character is amazing. Another is incredible. A third is astonishing or remarkable, or startling, or marvelous, or staggering, astonishing, incredible, shocking, or stunning, and always “extraordinary” – usually preceded by the words, “absolutely” or “extremely” “enormously,” “completely,” “utterly,” or “totally.”

One begins to wonder how many scenes in Shakespeare can be the most moving or most passionate scene in all of Shakespeare – or in all of human literature to this date for that matter.

Bloom leaves no sunlight for any other book or play or piece of art that might possibly ever try to grow up in the shade of Shakespeare to sprout a leaf.

I am about twelve lectures in but I just don’t think I can survive it. I love Shakespeare but I have stopped learning and started having visceral reactions to his sycophantic vocabulary.

Bloom seems to suggest that writers should just stop writing. They should all just set their pens down and read Shakespeare. The poet becomes disappointed because he "cannot be Adam early in the morning,” he explains. “There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything." According to the Wikipedia article about him, Bloom insists that “bardology [the worship of Shakespeare] ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is."

I am not saying that I disagree. I love reading and teaching Shakespeare.

I guess I just began noticing that half hours of lecture at a time were telling me nothing that I could not have figured out myself with the exception of a few really well placed quotes by some of the people that Harold Bloom has read in his long and illustrious career studying the subject.

Shakespeare remains, with Robert Frost, one of my favorite things to read but I think I shall always prefer to read Shakespeare than to read critics about him. And maybe that is the way it is supposed to be.

Question for Comment: How many things can be “extraordinary” before they are not?